time. The money they spend on these things, it’s important they can open their doors to pay for themselves.”
Charlie had become fascinated with what the short man knew about the casino construction business. How many people it took to build one, how many dollars it cost for the electric, plumbing, carpets, glass, neon. Then Charlie told the short man about the window cleaning business he had recently sold. He was curious about how much money window cleaners were making in Las Vegas. He had asked how much a window cleaning contract for a place as big as the Palermo was worth.
The short man said he would find out and took Charlie to the Palermo model. It was closed, but the short man had keys with him. They did a walk-through together, the short man quoting facts about the costs of the room as he pointed at light fixtures and furniture. Charlie remembered shaking his head in amazement.
Then the short man walked Charlie out back behind the model. It was dark there. The last thing Charlie remembered was another man standing in front of him with a pipe. The man had said something Charlie couldn’t remember. Then Charlie felt the air being knocked from his solar plexus. He felt kicks and punches. Everything went black.
It was nearly ten-thirty in the morning before he was released from the hospital. He took a taxi back to Harrah’s, but Charlie didn’t go straight up to his room. He walked again instead. He took the route past the construction site where he was assaulted the night before. Two uniformed guards stood watch at the front gates as construction trucks lined up to enter the site. The guards checked each driver for identification.
Charlie stopped at the Palermo model to look for the short man who had befriended him the night before. It bothered him that he was mugged but not robbed. It didn’t make sense. He considered describing the short man to the people working at the Palermo model but decided against it.
He was getting too many looks from passersby to interrogate anyone. When he saw himself in the reflection of a mirror hanging outside the model bathroom, Charlie was reminded that his head and hands were bandaged.
When he finally returned to his hotel room, it was a little after one o’clock in the afternoon. Lisa was gone. He remembered denying there was anyone with him to the doctors at the hospital when he was asked if there was someone they should contact. He remembered denying there was anyone at all.
He wondered then if it had been wishful thinking on his part that there was no one to contact. He looked around the room and noticed something was strange. He crossed the room to the windows then turned around to look the room over again. The room had been tidied up by the housecleaning service, but something seemed out of order.
He lit a cigarette from a pack on the small table and immediately realized what was different. His wife wasn’t just out someplace getting sun or shopping or working out. His wife was gone.
It was then that he spotted the note she had left him on his nightstand.
Chapter 4
“I can’t believe I’m sitting here,” Vincent Lano said. He lit a Marlboro cigarette, coughed violently after inhaling, and rubbed his eyes to keep them from tearing.
“You think maybe it’s time you quit?” Joey Francone asked. He was nearly half Lano’s age at twenty-five. He was dressed in skintight black pants, a black T-shirt, and black shoes. His huge arms bulged under his tight shirt.
They were parked at the far end of a minimall lot. Lano had moved the rented Ford Taurus under the shade of a row of trees. It was 110 degrees in the afternoon sun.
“How long they been in there?” Lano asked.
Francone glanced at his gold Rolex. “A long time.”
Lano stretched his neck. “Six fuckin’ hours in a plane and now another six hours in a car,” he said. “And then he’s flyin’ out here. For what?”
“He lost face in front of his crew,” Francone said.
“Because he slapped some broad? Guess what? He should’ve kept his hands in his pockets.”
Francone showed disgust at the comment. “First of all, the guy japped him, okay? Second, the guy broke his jaw. In front of people. He’s gotta make it right.”
Lano turned away from Francone to spit phlegm. “It’s offensive is what it is,” he said. “What it’s become.”
Francone craned his neck to see across the street. He glanced down at his watch. “Almost seven hours now,” he said.
Across the street from the minimall was the motel the two men were watching. They were waiting for a woman to leave the motel. Then they would assault the woman and take one of her front teeth. It was what their boss wanted.
It was also a job that upset Lano. He had never hit a woman in his life. “I guess the joke’s on me,” he said as he took another drag on his cigarette and immediately coughed up more phlegm.
Lano was fifty-two years old and dying from throat cancer. He was diagnosed with the fatal disease shortly before he left New York, but Lano never shared the information. After thirty-four years in the rackets, the aging mobster didn’t want anyone to know.
He was a made member of the Vignieri crime family of New York for more than twenty years. He had made his bones the old-fashioned way, killing his first man on orders by his twenty-first birthday. He had killed three more by his thirtieth birthday.
Now, so many years down the road, confronted by a death he couldn’t avoid, Lano was having second thoughts about the life he had chosen.
Francone, the young wannabe seated next to him in the front of the rented Ford Taurus, waved at the secondhand cigarette smoke. Francone was a close friend of Nicholas Cuccia, another young punk, who had recently become Lano’s new boss. Francone was a neat freak, nonsmoker, bodybuilder, with maybe five assaults, Lano guessed, to his entire mob resume.
Maybe the kid had a hit under his belt. Lano doubted it.
Too many guys like Francone were next in line to become made men when the mob books opened again. It bothered Lano that punks like the one seated next to him would soon be his equal.
“Least you could do is take a walk with those things,” Francone told Lano. “Gimme a break a few minutes. I’m suffocatin’ over here.”
Francone didn’t like Lano or all of the bitching and moaning he did. He, too, had taken the long red-eye flight from New York to Las Vegas the night before last. He, too, had been sitting in the car all fucking day. To top it off, he was missing back-to-back workouts while the old bastard sitting next to him slowly killed the two of them with his never-ending chain-smoking.
“Fuckin’ kids,” Lano said. He let the driver’s side window all the way down.
Francone shook his head. It was ninety-five degrees in the shade. He had two choices: he could choke to death on cigarette smoke, or he could sweat to death from the heat. He cracked the rear windows to let some more of the smoke escape.
“That guy really put this thing together,” he told Lano.
Lano suppressed another coughing fit. “You make it sound like the Normandy invasion.”
“The what?”
“Forget about it.”
“He could’ve fucked it up,” Francone said. “He got somebody to follow the broad. Who the hell knew she was gonna pull this? Imagine, this guy Pellecchia catches a beating from us and then his wife takes off with another guy?”
It was true. The guy who had arranged everything in Las Vegas, Allen Fein, told them how Charlie Pellecchia’s wife had split on him in the middle of their vacation. One of Fein’s people at Harrah’s had actually seen the note the wife had left her husband.
“Poor bastard,” Lano said.
Francone leered at Lano’s sympathy. “You mean fuckin’ loser.”
Lano tossed one cigarette and lit another. Francone waved his hands wildly in frustration.
“I’m sorry,” Lisa told John Denton. “I can’t again. I feel like shit. I feel terrible.”
